From Geoff Hobson’s Bengals.com article, used with permission.
The first three Bengals touchdowns came off snaps to three different players and the last two came off the blistering right hand of Dalton as he jacked his fourth-quarter passer rating this season to a perfect 158.3.
Which is what rookie wide receiver Mohamed Sanu’s career rating is after he stunned the Redskins when he lined up on the first play of the game as the quarterback in the Wildcat, faked a handoff, dropped back and hit Green in stride for a 73-yard touchdown after Dalton had lined up next to him.
Everyone was buzzing about the Sanu play. All the talk during the week had been centered on Redskins rookie quarterback Robert Griffin III’s ability to confound teams with a cannon arm to go along with the legs of an Olympic hurdler.
But Gruden, working against his his old head coach in the UFL, Redskins defensive coordinator Jim Haslett, beat everyone to the dance when he rolled out Sanu, another rookie, the third-rounder from Rutgers. Sanu says he can throw it 70 yards and he threw three touchdown passes his junior year and one on the first play, a 51-yarder against, of all teams, the University of Cincinnati.
"It puts the defense in a terrible position," Whitworth said. "You’ve got A. J. Green on the outside and you’ve got Sanu in a Wildcat situation, and they’ve got to bring a safety down for that, leaving A.J. one-on-one, and Sanu’s got that hose. We were excited about it."
Sanu and Green knew for a few days it was going to be the first play of the game.
"Coach Lewis was out there. We ran the play twice on Friday and he said, ‘Run that play one more time,’ and we scored," Green said. "And it was wide open again, so we put it in for the first play. You see Sanu back there and you’re thinking it’s going to be a running play, right? Exactly. I ran right over the top of the safety. Mo threw a perfect ball. I think they thought it was a run all the way.
"We know that Sanu could throw the ball and he put it in the bread basket and I ran right under it. I was just praying, ‘Let me go get it’ because once I was by him I saw I was wide open. So I was like please let me get by him so I can make a play on the ball, and it was a perfect ball."
The Bengals knew Sanu could throw when they drafted him with four Wildcat TD passes at Rutgers, but his new mates didn’t know it until he unleashed his arm in a flag football event at Paul Brown Stadium during the spring. Then they got another taste in the days leading up to the Jets preseason opener, when he worked as Tim Tebow on the scout team.
Sanu, the pride of South Brunswick High School who threw a touchdown pass for New Jersey in his last prep game in the New Jersey-New York All-Star Game, tossed the longest first NFL pass since Steelers punter Josh Miller threw one 81 yards in the last game of 2003. Sanu also became the first non-quarterback to throw a TD for the Bengals since punter Lee Johnson threw a seven-yarder in Pittsburgh in 1994.
But Sanu didn’t want to be mentioned in the same breath as RG III.
"He’s great," he said. "I love watching that guy play. I was just trying to stay calm and give A.J. a chance to catch the ball. I just wanted to get that ball so that man could run with it. He’s pretty hard to overthrow."
See a video of the play.

